The Plunger Incident

The Plunger Incident

Anyone who knows me well knows that I think poop is the funniest thing ever.

Any poop story you’ve experienced is a story I want to hear. I get this trait from my extremely outgoing family where we talk about poop stories at the dinner table at family gatherings.

Which is why this story I’m about to tell you is so dang funny. It’s a true story that happened to me and two of my best friends.

I call it…

The Plunger Incident

Here goes nothing.

My voice teacher at school is the choir director for a Baroque music festival on Beaver Island every summer. Many of the islanders sing in this choir, but to beef it up a little, he invites select students from his choir here at school to come up and sing. We stay with host families, sing for a two-hour rehearsal each day, perform in multiple concerts throughout the week and when we aren’t doing anything we can hang at the beach and soak up some of that gorgeous sun and Lake Michigan views.

Last summer, I was fortunate enough to get invited. Eight of us went. And boy, we came back tanner than ever, full to the brim with new music knowledge, closer to the friends we went with and bursting of stories of what happened on the island.

One night, a couple of days into the trip, the four girls decided to mosey on over to one of our host families house to cook dinner and have a girls night. We were sick of eating out for every meal and we just wanted to hang out with each other. We all got our own chicken, veggies, and side dishes to cook together at this house. And lemme tell you, it was great! Everything tasted so much better knowing that it was cooked homemade. (Don’t get me wrong, the food on Beaver Island is phenomenal, but eating out every night and day got old fast).

After dinner, we’re sitting outside enjoying the fresh air and Vitamin C. And my friend Madalyn decides that she needs to poop. She goes upstairs, but less than five minutes later she comes back downstairs with a completely straight face and says, “the toilet is clogged and not with my poop and I can’t find a plunger anywhere.”

Take a second to imagine if you found yourself in this situation. What would you do? Would you search the whole house to find a plunger? Would you just leave it in the toilet for the next people to find and pretend you didn’t see it?

The four of us went upstairs to see the damage that was done. It was bad, lemme tell you. And to make matters worse, Madalyn thought the container used to hold the toilet bowl brush next to the toilet was the plunger. She was unpleasantly surprised to see that it wasn’t and that she had gotten poop water all over the floor in front of the toilet.

Well, we went and searched the ENTIRE house for a plunger. Guess what we didn’t find?

A plunger.

We were getting pretty nervous at this point. We couldn’t just leave the toilet like that because this wasn’t our house! After 20 minutes of looking, we decided to flush the toilet one more time and if it started rising, then my friend Heather and I were to ride our bikes as fast as we could to the grocery to go buy a plunger (the grocery store on Beaver Island is right down the street from this house). Heather and I sat at the bottom of the stairs with the door open and our shoes on waiting for Madalyn to flush the toilet. There was a second of silence, a flush, and not two seconds later, a “GO GO GO.”

Heather and I biked to the grocery store as fast as we possibly could, almost falling over the whole way there because we were laughing so hard. When we got there, we looked up and down every aisle AT LEAST three times. And we couldn’t find a plunger. The panic was starting to set in. Heather and I went through the cleaning aisle one more time just praying to God that we would find one, and we did. We found the LAST plunger in the store. When we went up to pay for it, the cashier was an attractive human. Heather told me to run and as I ran back to the bikes, I heard an uproar of laughter behind me. (Later I was told that Heather had told the cashier that this was not a problem that we had caused, but it was a problem we had to fix).

I got back to the house and ran the plunger up to Madalyn. She looked at me, then looked at the plunger, and then back to me like, “what am I supposed to do with this?” Heather then took the plunger from me and attempted to fix the mess we were gifted with.

No luck.

So I tried.

Also no luck.

At this point, this situation is so comical that we can’t even believe it’s happening to us. None of us know how to plunge a toilet!

We looked up videos on YouTube. What we watched didn’t seem right. So, I called my boyfriend back at home. He talked us through how to do it. But not without laughing at us first.

Each of us tried again. Still no luck.

At one point, Heather and I couldn’t even walk down the stairs we were laughing so hard.

Finally, my friend Amanda tried and she FINALLY got the poop to go down the toilet.

PRAISE GOD.

After that, because Madalyn got poop water all over the floor, we cleaned the bathroom. Every inch of it. We cleaned the plunger, we cleaned the shower, we cleaned the floor, we cleaned the sinks, we cleaned it all. Halfway through Madalyn looks up at us and says, “I wasn’t made for this,” and laughed as she went back to scrubbing the floor. The whole house smelled like cleaning products.

And we left the plunger, so in case this ever happened again, they would be able to handle it in a more graceful way then we did.

Needless to say, nobody pooped there the rest of the week.

I look back on this tragically funny story and wonder how this could actually happen to someone. But every time I think of it, I can’t help but laugh.

Hopefully you are reading this just for a laugh and not that this has ever happened to you. But if it has..